Virgin Machine (HKLGFF 2026)

Dorothee Müller has a problem: she’s a Hamburg journalist researching romantic love, and she can’t find a shred of it. Ditching her dysfunctional relationships (and a hormone specialist’s baffling theories), she flies to San Francisco in search of her runaway mother, and tumbles instead down the rabbit hole of the city’s lesbian demi-monde, guided by strip-show barker Susie Sexpert (real-life sex guru Susie Bright) and magnetic drag king Ramona (Shelly Mars). Shot in luminous black-and-white by the great Elfi Mikesch, Monika Treut’s sex-positive picaresque scandalised feminists and censors alike in 1988 and has since ripened into an underground classic: part German-expressionist satire, part sapphic travelogue, all liberation. Ina Blum is irresistible as the wide-eyed pilgrim who came looking for love and found her libido. The dildo lecture alone is worth a ticket.